Dhru Purohit Show - #242: How to Use Intermittent Fasting to Lose Weight, Live Longer, and Feel Better with Dr. Jason Fung

Episode Date: October 7, 2021

How to Use Intermittent Fasting to Lose Weight, Live Longer, and Feel Better | This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers and InsideTracker. Sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is nothing at all. That’s how I like to look at intermittent fasting. Embracing planned periods without eating has numerous well-researched benefits for our health and longevity. And it’s not just about weight; it’s also about cellular clean-up, which reduces the risk of chronic disease and increases our healthspan in the process. Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru talks to Dr. Jason Fung about using intermittent fasting as a tool for optimal health and why dietary advice based on the energy-balance model has only made the obesity epidemic worse.  In this episode, we dive into:  -What role fasting plays when it comes to optimal health and longevity (6:34)  -Why autophagy is so important for health and longevity (7:46)  -The most important thing for turning on and off autophagy (11:28) -Why we age and common things that contribute to it (14:52) -How calorie restriction increases longevity (24:34) -Calorie restriction vs. fasting (28:11)  -The calorie debate (32:07)  -Understanding calorie deficit, weight loss, and the energy-balance model (40:12) -The problem with the “calories in, calories out” model of weight management (48:04) -How Dr. Fung incorporates fasting into his life (53:50) -Three key things to focus on for successful behavior change (57:10)    For more on Dr. Jason Fung you can follow him on Instagram @DrJasonFung, on Twitter @DrJasonFung, on YouTube @drjasonfung, and through his website https://thefastingmethod.com/.  For more on Dhru Purohit, you can follow him on Instagram @dhrupurohit, and on YouTube @dhrupurohit. Text Dhru at [phone] and sign up for his Try This Newsletter - https://dhrupurohit.com/newsletter. This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers and InsideTracker. BiOptimizers Magnesium Breakthrough contains 7 different forms of magnesium, which all have different functions in the body. Right now, BiOptimizers is offering my community a few special bundles and for a limited time BiOptimizers with select purchases, just head over to magbreakthrough.com/dhru with code DHRU10.   InsideTracker looks at everything from metabolic and inflammatory markers to nutrients and hormones. Traditional lab tests can be hard to read on your own, but InsideTracker makes their results easy to understand and even provides tips on how to use food first for optimal nutrition. Right now, they’re offering my podcast community 25% off. Just go to insidetracker.com/DHRU. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you do fasting, of course, and you're going to reduce those nutrient sensors, which is going to intrinsically reduce growth and potentially reduce your risk of cancer. Because we know that there's a number of cancers that are highly insulin sensitive. Hi, everyone. Drew Brod here. How can we tap into the power of fasting to optimize our health and maybe even increase our longevity? Well, today we have Dr. Jason Fung back on the podcast to talk about this exact subject. If you're fascinated about the topic of fasting to improve your health, stay tuned.

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Welcome to the Drew Perrault podcast. Each week we explore the inner workings of the brain and the body with one of the brightest minds and wellness, medicine, and mindset. This week's guest is Dr. Jason Fung, who's back with us for a second time on the podcast. Dr. Fung is a physician, author, and researcher, his groundbreaking and science-based books about diabetes and obesity, which are called the Diabetes Code, the Obesity Code, and the complete guide to fasting, have sold over one million copies and challenged the conventional wisdom that diabetic should be treated with insulin alone. Dr. Fung is a guiding light and a source

of wisdom when it comes to the topic of fasting. Today, we have them back on the podcast to talk about how we can tap into the power of fasting to improve our health, lose weight, and potentially even increase longevity. It's a powerful conversation. Stay tuned. Dr. Jason Fung, welcome back to the podcast. It's a pleasure to have you here. Oh, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Yeah, I always enjoy it. And I'd love talking to you with your knowledge of all things, health optimization, reversal of tight tube diabetes, breaking through all the limiting challenges and reasons that kept the society obese for a long time. And today, we're going to chat a little bit about fasting.

And you've talked about fasting for so many different aspects of health, from obesity, diabetes to cancer. Today, I want to talk a little about optimization and longevity. So let's start off with the basics. What role can fasting play when it comes to optimizing our health and maybe even longevity? Yeah, that's a really interesting question because a lot of the research is still coming out. But fasting does a lot of different things. And remember, when we're talking about fasting, it's really just any period of time that you're not eating.

So there's no specific sort of, oh, you must do sort of like 40 days and 40 nights thing. There's no necessarily set limit. It all depends on the different type of person. However, there are several interesting things that happen as you get. get into sort of, you know, 24 hours plus of fasting. And the thing that most people talk about most commonly or the sort of most topical thing is autophagy. And that's one of these things that has really, in the last, say, five years has really

broken through into the consciousness, public consciousness, because in 2016, one of the big researchers in autophagy was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine. So, of course, it brought a lot of publicity to it. A lot of people heard about it. And what it is, is autophagy is this process where when you don't eat, your body starts to eat itself. That's what the word actually means, auto meaning self and phagin meaning eat. So you eat yourself.

Sounds really bad. Sounds like, you know, you're catabolizing, you're cannibalizing yourself. But that's actually very, very good. because what it does is in a time where you don't have a lot of access to food, such as fasting, your body is going to break down sort of the sort of low-level stuff. So the proteins that are not working too well, they're really old, they're sort of junky, and it burns it off for energy. And it happens to these subcellular organelles.

and basically what you're trying to do is get rid of all the junk. So it's one of these mechanisms that's very hard to activate otherwise. And it's very important because a lot of the research was done on yeast. So this is actually a mechanism that has been conserved through evolution, basically through all sort of living things from yeast onwards. So very, very important to health if you look at it from that standpoint. So what happens, of course, is that your body, like most people think breaking down is bad, but it's generally very good as you get older.

So when you're young, you want to build things up, right? You're getting bigger, you're getting stronger. You know, everything's growing in size. As you get to be an adult, it's not good to have a lot of great. Extra growth is generally bad for you. So whether you're talking cancer, whether you're talking, you know, heart disease and stuff, which is, you know, a lot of growth factors are actually going to make it worse. So one of the things that is really important to do is actually get rid of these sort of old junky parts.

And then what happens, of course, during fasting is that as you sort of get rid of all that old junk, then your growth hormone is high. So as you eat again, your body is going to start rebuilding whatever is necessary. So you start with getting rid of stuff. Then your body says, okay, so what do I actually need? And then it's going to rebuild it. So when you think about that whole process of getting rid of old stuff and then bringing back or rebuilding new stuff, it's the process of rejuvenation. So if you think about renovation, for example, you think that, oh, building is good, but you can't renovate that way.

If you have an old bathroom that you want to renovate, like the first thing you got to do is throw out all the old stuff. So you've got to get rid of that avocado green tub and matching toilet kind of thing. You've got to throw it out so you can put in a new tub and new floors and all that sort of stuff. But the first step is to get rid of the stuff. And that's why autophagy is so important because without that, you can't actually rejuvenate yourself. If you don't get rid of the old stuff, you can't get new stuff in, right? It's like the spring cleaning for your body. Until you throw out all the stuff, you can't do anything.

So that's why it's so important this process of rejuvenation. So you're actually trying to make yourself sort of almost younger in that sense because that's what that fasting does. And you might say, okay, well, you know, what is the most important thing in terms of turning off and on autophagy? And it's really protein. So when you eat protein, that process of autophagy, so amino acids, which is the sort of building blocks of proteins, that is really just going to turn off autophagy just like that. So if people eating sort of, you know, a little bit all the time and they're eating protein bars and all that, time, you're really never getting into that stage of autophagy. And that's, that's one of the things that people have talked about recently. Of course, the other things is that as you fast, what you're doing

is you're tamping down. And this is another area of sort of very important sort of breakthroughs in the last five, ten years, is that we have in our bodies, certain nutrient sensors. That is, we sense what food, energy is available. So we have insulin, if you take carbohydrates, you have mTOR, which is senses if you take proteins, that kind of things. We have nutrient sensors. It turns out that these nutrient sensors are also growth factors. So when you're eating, you are turning up growth signaling. So anytime you eat, It's just built into our system. So if you look back, for instance, insulin, if you look back, insulin didn't start off as a nutrient sensor the way we think of it now.

Right? You eat, you know, bread, insulin goes up. It's a nutrient sensor. It didn't start out that way. It started out as a growth factor. So what we've learned recently is that both the growth factors and the nutrient sensor, in the human body, insulin mTOR, are exactly the same molecule. So anytime you're eating, anytime you're taking nutrition, you're actually ramping up

growth. And again, growth in most cases for adults is not a good thing. You don't want things to keep growing. That's how things break down. You actually got to get rid of stuff and then grow stuff. So a lot of these things like cancer, which is a disease of growth, are not going to be improved by insulin, say example, because that's going to increase growth and cancer loves insulin, so it ramps up very quickly. So the thing is that when you do fasting, of course,

you're going to reduce those nutrient sensors, which is going to intrinsically reduce growth and potentially reduce your risk of cancer because we know that there's a number of cancers that are highly insulin sensitive, breast cancer, colorectal cancer, for example. So those are two examples of how fasting sort of through autophagy and through reduced growth signaling are going to be super, super important for longevity and, you know, preventing disease, preventing cancers, that kind of thing. You know, you've shared before in other interviews that to really understand the importance of all this, we have to also understand and ask the most basic of basic questions, which is why do we age? And you talked about how growth is not great as we get older, but for a long time and maybe still a little bit right now,

There's people that are not really clear about why is it that we age and what are the common things that contribute to that. And if we don't understand why we age, it's hard to understand how we can encourage longevity. So can you just take us through maybe a quick little history lesson of just what were some of the theories that were out there of aging and what do some of the more contemporary ideas say around aging and why are they so important? Yeah, and it's still sort of not well, sort of known. I mean, there's a lot of theories of aging, like, you know, it's built in so that, you know, you get this constant replenishment of genes and so on.

Initially, they thought, well, it's just sort of like a machine, right? It gets old, and then it breaks down, and there's nothing you can do about it. It's not quite true because our cells actually don't break down. We don't have the same cells. They sort of, our cells grow. they die like red blood cells, right? Every 30 days you sort of replace your blood cells. They're not the same cells. So it's not like a machine.

It's not like a, you know, a stapler. You use it and you use it. Eventually it just breaks down and there's nothing you can do. That's not like our cells. Our cells actually rejuvenate. So then within our cells, we actually have this sort of built-in senescence mechanism, which is that after a certain number of replications, the cells can no longer divide, and therefore they start to get the problem with aging. and this is controlled with the telomeres, for example. So in the genes, you have, in the DNA, you actually have these in the chromosomes.

So DNA is packaged within a chromosome. At the ends of the chromosomes, you have these telomere caps and, you know, sort of like an eraser on top of a pencil sort of thing. Just sits on top. And every time you replicate the cell, it sort of shrinks. And then once it gets down to nothing, the cell can no longer replicate. and basically it's senescent or it can no longer do anything, then it gets replaced with, say, scar tissue and so on. So you get less functional tissue and you get more scar tissue.

But that's sort of this built-in senescent mechanism. Cancer actually circumvents that by getting rid of that, you know, problem with the telomere cap. It doesn't reduce each time. And that's one of the reasons that cancer can actually replicate indefinitely. You know, and that's one of the interesting things. you see with unicellular organisms as well, you know, as we talked about with the cancer code. But the, so aging seems to be this sort of built-in sort of clock, but it doesn't necessarily have to

because, again, one of the things that people now talk about is, one, you can't do anything about that telomere thing. It used to be very popular. I used to see it all the time, but telomere-based science and all this stuff. It was just a big marketing ploy. You can't do a lot about it. unless you really want to give yourself cancer or something like that. But the whole idea is that, you know, with aging, it's not just about the sort of age. It's about the health as well. So people talk now about the health span. And in terms of aging, can you really slow it down by increasing this sort of rejuvenation of this is not of the cell,

but of those subseller parts as with autophagy. and fasting and also to some extent slowing down metabolic rate, which I actually think is kind of interesting as well because one of the things that people always talk about, and this is a bit of a sidebar, but people always talk about how they want to keep their metabolic rate revved up. And I always think, okay, sure, it's easier to lose weight that way, I get you on that. But if you're not trying to lose weight, is it really beneficial to keep your metabolic rate revved up? Because, you know, it's like a car, right? You rev the engine, you can run faster, but you're going to burn out sooner.

So it's like, are you really sacrificing one way or the other? So the way a lot of people look at it now is sort of this seesaw between growth and longevity. So, you know, you can either grow really fast, but you're going to live a short time, or you're going to be on the other side of the seesaw, which is you're not going to grow and you're going to live long, right? So that's where people are looking at, you know, trying to slow down growth, you know, trying to say, okay, let's make sure that we're not stimulating these things that are going to increase growth factors, and those are all the nutrient sensors. So you look at some of the longest sort of lived people in the world, you know, Akinawa and stuff where they talk about. about eating 80%, you know, until you're only, until you're about 80% full and, you know, people in Japan who also eat very little. So their metabolic rates are likely lower.

Like if you ever go to Europe or Japan or some of these places, like they don't eat much. I mean, compared to an American meal. You go to a restaurant and you go, whoa, I just pay a lot of money and that's all the food I get. So they don't eat a lot. So clearly they're used to it. So therefore, if they're not eating a lot, then since their weight is stable, their metabolic rates probably are not running as fast either. So therefore, they may be by eating smaller amounts by tradition, they may be choosing sort of to slow down growth and trying to go for that longevity as opposed to that growth, which is where Americans, North Americans, Canadians tend to be more,

let's hit the growth and then maybe we don't hit that longevity as well. So if you're talking longevity, it's tied in very tightly to growth factors, growth signaling, that kind of thing. Well, it seems, you know, putting the two pieces of the questions together that you've answered so far, it seems like fasting has a very unique role, both when it comes to the health span aspect of improving your overall metabolic health, which is going to be one of the one of the of the pathways to keep your metabolic rate down because if you are in better health, you're not struggling with processing food all day long, you're going to be able to keep your metabolic rate a little bit lower, which is going to improve your metabolic health, the way that I understand it.

And then there's this other aspect where fasting also can play. It's not fully understood, but at least some evidence that's there. It can play a role with longevity. So it's both the health span and the lifespan. And is that a good way to think about it? I think so. I think so. So, you know, and fasting, interestingly enough, has always been sort of used as this way of staying healthy, right? You look back at all these traditions that we have.

And, you know, so like religious fasting, for example. So, you know, in most religions, they have a period of fasting. And of course, at the time that these religions were established, there's not a lot of obesity. In fact, starvation is the predominant, is much more common than obesity back, say, two, three, four thousand years ago, whenever these religions. And there's tons of them, right, that do the fasting. So it's interesting because when they talk about the fasting, it's a form of, like, they're not trying to punish themselves, right? It's not that they're trying to do something bad. They're usually trying to do something healthy for the body.

So whether you're talking Buddhism or Hinduism or Christianity or whatever it is, sometimes it's couched in terms of sort of self-denial, but a lot of times it's just something that's supposed to be sort of intrinsically healthy for you. And it's interesting because this is outside of weight loss. So for North Americans particularly, the weight loss thing is a huge impact. that's a huge health benefit right there from fasting. But in terms of longevity, it may be that also it's going to have a, like,

this massive improvement in longevity by doing something. And it's sort of always been recognized that it is something that's healthy for you, whether they talk about a detox or whether you talk about a purification or, you know, a cleansing or something. It's always termed in the same way that it's something that you're sort of clearing out the old junk sort of thing. And interestingly enough, that's exactly what autophagy is. So in the last sort of 10 years, we've actually recognized the science behind all of this old sort of terminology of cleansing and detoxification that, hey, maybe it's actually true. Maybe we've only just sort of put the scientific term on what all these other people who, you know, they didn't know the science, but they knew the benefits of what they were doing

and then codified it within these religious practices that various people follow. So it's an interesting, interesting way to look at it. So not only, as you said, with the health, you know, in terms of weight loss and all that stuff that's immediately, you know, obvious, but there may be that sort of hidden thing that that takes a little longer for people to understand, yeah, hey, this is something that's really, really highly beneficial for us. Let's talk about caloric restriction and the importance of, first of all, for people that don't know what it is, just explaining, and how it fits in to the conversation that we're

having here. Yeah, so caloric restriction is probably the only really well-established scientific way of increasing longevity. And it's mostly animal studies. So they do this in animal studies. They take rats or something and they have one that eats whatever they want and one group where they restrict how much they eat. And the group that restricts how much they eat generally live longer. So fruit flies and they've done it in all kinds of animals. So this has been shown for ages. And that was sort of this really interesting, and the first studies I came out with, you know, came out like, you know, 30, 40 years ago, as a real shock to people, because people thought, well,

hey, if you're more nourished, right, more nutrients, more vitamins, you're going to live longer, but they didn't. They all live shorter. And that was quite a shock. And this is that whole, that's what sort of is that whole see-saw between growth and longevity sort of thing. So caloric restriction is well established in most animal models as a way to increase longevity. In humans, of course, it's really hard to do those studies.

There was a few inadvertent sort of ways to do it. But the problem is that you have to go between malnourishment. You don't want to get malnourished. So there's this continuum between calorie restriction, which, is okay and malnourishment where you're just not getting enough vitamins and minerals and stuff and then you actually do very badly so sometimes they've crossed over there was a couple of biosphere experiments where they they sort of crossed that line i think you know remember those old experiments where people would live in a in this contained dome and stuff and it was a little controversial at the time

but they wound of sort of fairly severely calorie restricting themselves and it wasn't always pretty it wasn't great. So that was sort of an inadvertent human experiment into it. A fascinating sort of study for like sort of thing to look at sort of 20 years ago. But the whole idea is that if you are well-nourished, as most people in North America say are, then the calorie restriction may actually improve your lifespan and health span by a fairly significant. amount. So caloric restriction, and the question then is how do you do it? And this is one of the big questions. So you can do it like the Okinawans do it, where you say, I am going to sort of eat to

80%. And so you impose that sort of structure so that you can do it. If you don't impose any kind of structure and you think day to day, oh, I'm just going to stop eating like, you know, a little bit. If you have to keep thinking about it, it's never going to work. Fasting is another way, of course, to impose that sort of caloric restriction by giving you the structure. So if you say, I'm not going to eat today, then you're almost automatically going to, you know, calorie restrict yourself. There's some interesting studies on fasting where they try to get around that because people always try to say, well, is it the fasting or is it the calories? It's like, I don't really care. Like if you do fasting properly, then you are going to be calorie restricted.

right but so what if i tell people okay cut 500 calories a day and it you know it just doesn't work to lose weight then it doesn't matter it's it's just a failed strategy so why do i care that if i can do it through fasting that i reduce 500 calories a day by saying oh i'm just going to eat once a day and that's going to do a 500 calorie a day restriction uh if it's successful it's successful like it doesn't matter whether or not you restrict calories uh how you restrict calories If it works, it works, right? So don't worry about it so much. So there's some interesting studies lately that have tried to look at fasting.

What they do is they try to get around that whole calorie part by saying, okay, you'll fast, but then you'll eat more when you're eating. But that's not really the point of it, right? The whole point of the fasting is that when you're not eating, you're going to activate these mechanisms, you're going to get rid of some of this old stuff, you don't need to eat more because you're using up your body fat and all that sort of stuff. So the calorie restriction part of things is certainly part, I think part of the fasting. So therefore, I think you just have to take it all together and rather than try to sort of tease it out and say,

well, is it the calories? Is it the fasting? It's all part of the same thing. So it's just not that easy. If you eat once a day or if he, you know, if he eats every two days, it's not easy to pack all those three meals into a single one. Yeah, I think what's important about what you're saying, and please correct her if I'm wrong, because I definitely get things wrong sometimes, is that, you know, we call it caloric restriction. And it is the most studied model for increasing longevity, specifically in animal trials. but we don't want to get too caught up in the idea of the calorie component.

It's really just taking a break from your body doing that work so it can enter into the repair mode. And when you understand that, you can take advantage of it because even the idea, we've talked about it a bunch of this podcast, that the primary recommendations and guidance from whether it's the FDA or the World Health Organization, that weight loss is primarily a math equation. And if you want to lose weight, it's just about eating less and exercising more is really not, you know, the full picture and might actually be very misguided in its approach, because there's so many other aspects that go into weight gain like insulin, the mechanism of insulin and how that plays into it. So it's important to understand calorie restriction and

caloric restriction as a concept, but really we're talking about taking advantage of your body going into the right environment so it can go into repair mode. Exactly. And that's the whole idea of this seesaw, right? You're either going sort of, sort of in growth mode or you're going into sort of repair mode, right? And that's, that's one of the things that, you know, it's been a real shift in the last sort of number of years because, of course, this whole idea of, you know, rejuvenation, repair and stuff was probably only about five or ten years. Like before that, everybody was like, growth, growth, growth. So it's like, if that's what you want to do, then it's eat, eat, eat, eat, which is, you know, of course,

then you wound up with this whole obesity epidemic, then this kind of thing. But you're absolutely right. I mean, this whole calories thing, this whole calories debate is, you know, to my mind, always a little bit silly. So the whole thing about calories is that it's not a concept from physiology.

It's a concept from physics. So it's a unit of heat energy. That's purely what it is, right? But it doesn't tell you anything about what your body does with that energy. So for example, if you eat a block of wood, it has a number of calories, because if you burn it, it has a lot of calories because it's energy. That's energy. But your body cannot do anything with it. So you eat a block of wood, it comes out your rectum, and that's it. That's all, there's no energy associated with it, even though within that wood, there is a lot of

potential energy. So it's the same thing, right? The calories, your body doesn't say, oh, you have this X number of calories, so I'm going to do this. Now, your body has to translate that into something else. And that's that piece that's missing, right? It translates it into hormones, which is why you always have to look at the hormones because that's sort of the language of the body. That's physiology, right?

You can't take a unit of energy like physics and say, well, all calories are the same because calories do different things. So that block of wood does nothing for you. If you eat a cookie, it's going to trigger off hormones that are incredibly different than if you're to eat, say, an egg, for example, right? So you eat protein and fat. The hormonal profile that you get is completely different than if you eat a cookie, which is completely different than if you eat a block of wood. Yet the calories are all equal.

So how is that the same? Because those hormones are what tells our body what to do, go into growth mode, go into repair. out or don't do anything at all, right, with a piece of wood. So, so, so that, that whole thing about calories is, you know, I say it just because that's what people are used to. It's, it's easy for people to understand what's going on. But truthfully, the whole concept is quite useless to understand what's going on with the body. Like, you take, you know, 100 calories of cookies and 100 calories of an egg, for example, right? The minute those foods go into your mouth, the hormonal response is totally different. Therefore, our bodies are going to be doing something completely

different with those two foods, even though they're the same calories, right? If your insulin goes up, your body says, store that calories as fat. If it doesn't go up, your body will say, take those calories and use them, burn it for energy, right? So it's totally different. And, you know, I think that that's where people get so messed up is because we're so ingrained in this idea of calories, that calories are equal, because when you put them as the same thing, 100 calories of cookies, 100 calories of broccoli, well, now they're both 100 calories, so you can treat them the same. You cannot treat them the same. There's no, there's no physiologic way that they are the same in any degree. Like, yes, there's an overlap. Sure,

there's more overlap between that and 100 calories of water. but those calories is nothing. It's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's just energy right. What her body does with that energy is what's important. Do you store it as fat? Do you build new proteins, right? Do you just increase the metabolic rate and burn it as heat for example? It's all different, right? In one case, you're going to get stronger, right? In one case, you're going to get fatter. And in one case, your your metabolic rate's going to go up. Completely different. from the same hundred calories.

It's such an important point. And this idea, which was really a theory, the calorie in calorie out model of obesity and sort of why we gain weight, it's so indoctrinated into society that a lot of individuals, including well-established experts and doctors, took it as just settled science. And recently, you know, there was. was a big paper that was done review paper in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition by Dr. David Ludwig at Harvard, including a bunch of other doctors that were there too. And really, they took you through the whole journey of how we got there, how it was shaky science that

sort of led to that understanding. And you've talked about this as well, too, just highlighting it because that paper was published recently. We'll have the link in the show notes. And then all the way to the idea of understanding exactly what you shared about how hormones is the missing piece of the puzzle. You know, when I read that and I hear your example, I often think about, you know, NASA has the largest vacuum that they use to test devices that they're going to put in space. It's the largest vacuum in the world. And it's, I think in, I think it might be in Georgia, but I'll have to double check that. And if you take a bowling ball and you take a feather and you drop it in a vacuum, they both fall at the same rate. But in the real world, if you're in a Boeing

747 and you drop a bowling ball and a feather at the same time, they're not going to fall at the same rate. And our body is like that. It's a bunch of moving parts and pieces. It's not just physics that are in isolation. That's what I'm hearing from your message. Well, exactly. And this, you know, I think the whole calories thing is sort of physics envy sort of thing, right? We want to be as clean and as precise as physics is, right? Because you look at physics, wow, they're building spaceships and, you know, computers. and all this stuff, and it's like, this is great, right? So physics is all very precise, it's all very math-based.

And when physiology wants to be sort of, you know, has all this physics envy, you're like, we want to be precise, just like physics. But then you ignore the whole messiness that is human physiology, because, you know, does insulin go up? You know, take those 100 calories, right? Does insulin go up? Does it not go up? Does peptide Y, Y, which is a satiety hormone, go up?

Does it not go up? Do the stretch receptors in your stomach go up or down if you eat a big fibrous meal, like a big, you know, if you eat a lot of, say, say, vegetables and your stomach stretches out? Well, it doesn't have any calories because you could eat hair and your stomach will stretch and turn on your society signals, right? So there's stretch receptors in the stomach. Does those hundred calories, do they increase colostocinin, which is in response to fat, for example? What does it do to leptin? Like, it's messy like crazy. But that's reality, right?

And all it means is that, you know, because every food is going to have a different hormonal profile, all it says is that certain foods for the same number of calories are more fattening than others, which is actually just common sense, right? I don't think anybody would really doubt that cookies and ice cream is more fattening than salmon and salad. It's hard to get fat eating salad. It just is. So that's very common sense. It's totally in line with what the physiology is that, hey, all these foods have different

hormonal profiles. Some are going to lead to more body increasing fat stores, right? And others are not. So therefore, some foods are more fatting the other. That's all it says. I don't see how that's so non-scientific. Some people say, oh, you're a calorie denier or something like that. I'm just telling you that calories is not a concept of physiology.

It's a concept of physics. And it's this whole idea that they are equal and this whole idea of, oh, creating a caloric deficit. I mean, that's another really stupid, stupid idea, I have to say. So this idea of, oh, to lose weight, you have to create a caloric deficit. Now, that's always true. The question is, how do you create the caloric deficit? Remember, when you take that energy balance equation, you have body fat, which is a storage form of energy, right? It's a storage form of calories.

It's stored calories. That's basically what it is. Body fat equals calories and calories out. So when you look at that, it's in quality, right? X equals A plus B or whatever, right? So body fat equals calories in minus calories out. That's always true. The question is, so it's not two things.

you have three variables there. And those always have to balance. So you can never have a deficit. You either have storage, you have calories in, you have calories out. So the question is how do you create that inequality? If you want to lose body fat, you want to have calories in minus calories out. So if you, that's true. But then they take that next step and they say, therefore, all you have to do is reduce your calories in.

Well, two things can happen when you reduce those calories in. Either, right, so you have three things. You have storage, you have calories in, you have calories out. So you reduce calories in. Two possible things can happen. Either body fat goes down, which is what they tell you is going to happen. Or, which is perfectly in line with math, right? Either when calories in goes down, either body fat goes down or calories out goes down.

both are possibilities because there's three variables here what they don't tell you which is what the science of the last hundred years has told you is that every time you reduce calories in just by focusing on calories and not focusing on the hormones what happens is not that the body fat goes down but that the calories out or your metabolic rate goes down so we know this from i don't know there's there's hundreds of years of research of this the first research looking at this was from 1917. So more than 100 years ago, they showed this exact thing. Reduce calories in, reduce calories out. Your calories out goes down. So you take 2,000 calories in, drops down to 1,500, right? So two things can happen. Either your body loses 500 calories

of body fat or your metabolic rate goes down by 500. Guess which one almost always happens is that the calories out goes down. That's just science. We know that. We've been proven that over and over again. So therefore, the question is not about whether or not a caloric deficit reduces body fat. Yes, it does. The question is, how do you create that caloric deficit? You cannot do that by reducing calories in. You similarly cannot reduce it by trying to increase calories out by exercising, which is the other thing that people always talk about. Because yes, when you exercise, you are going to increase the rate of energy that your skeletal muscles will use. But there's all these other parts of her body.

That exercise does nothing for. So there's your bladder, there's your kidneys. Like, does exercising increase the metabolic rate of your kidneys? Not in the least. Your liver, your heart, your lungs, your brain. Like, there's all these other organ systems that use energy all the time. The skeletal muscle is only a single system, right? So yeah, if you exercise for six hours a day, you can sort of overwhelm that effect.

But remember, most of us are, say, burning 2,000 calories a day. You go for a run or something. You might burn what? You've seen those treadmills. That calorie counter goes up really, really slowly, right? So if you have somebody, okay, so you burn 200 calories, 300 calories. Like, you're not even at 10% of what your body does using your kidneys, your liver, your body heat generation, all that kind of thing. So this idea that you're going to exercise your way out of it is also similarly false.

other thing is that remember there's three variables you increase your calories out by exercising two things can happen one is that you're going to use take that energy from your body fat stores that's what they want to happen that's what almost never happens what happens is that you eat more right and that's perfectly in balance with this energy balance equation three variables they always only look at two of them, right, as if one of them is fixed, as if your calories out are fixed. And that's the whole thing that these people never seem to understand. I don't know why. It's very obvious when you just put it out. There's three legs on the stool, right? You change one, one of the other two can change. It's not for sure that, you know, they say body fat equals calories and minus calories out,

reduce calories in, calories out. If it stays stable, then you'll lower your body fat. But it doesn't stay stable. That's the problem. Yeah, it seems that when things are built on consensus understanding, it's much more difficult for people to keep an open mind and ask the most fundamental of questions because it's how could we question this? This is what we've been spending all our time, effort, and energy. And a lot of people would have to raise their hand, which is actually a beautiful part of science, but it takes a lot of courage and say, actually I think we got it wrong. I need to start asking these most fundamental of questions,

but that's hard to do when so much of your life, your work, your research, your advocacy has been built on one specific way of looking at it. But the beautiful thing is, you know, especially with, you know, I love, every time I go on YouTube, I love watching your channel.

And I love it for two reasons, besides the fact that you just give incredible information. I'm like, this is an incredible education tool for the person who's out there who doesn't know about all the debates that are there. They just want to improve their health. They're just trying to break free of obesity or type 2 diabetes or feel a little bit better. And they've been trying and they've been following the standard device for years. And they actually feel like a failure because everybody around them has been telling them you're not doing it hard enough or maybe even you're lying.

Maybe you're secretly cheating. Maybe you're not cutting your food enough and you're not exercising enough. And that is a failed message. So I'm just so happy that people can get information that actually can make a huge difference in their life directly from the sources of individuals who are willing to ask and re-question what they were taught about in school. So just another way of me saying that I'm grateful for your work and message. Oh, thanks. Yeah. And I talk about a lot of this sort of physiological stuff on my YouTube channel.

Like, you know, talking about things, for example, last week I was talking about sort of the role of monotony in diets and varieties and, you know, how variety actually makes it more, you know, harder to lose weight because you've got all these sort of delicious foods. Because we eat sort of for two reasons, right? You eat for hunger. But you also eat for pleasure, right? So if you take away the pleasure because you're eating the same thing. day after day after day, then you're just going to eat for hunger. When you do that, you stop eating as soon as you're not hungry anymore. And that's going to play a role in the end.

So you have these drugs, for example, that can suppress the appetites. Nicotine, probably is a classic one, right? You just didn't really want to eat as much when you smoked. So people lost weight. And then when they stop smoking, of course, they gain some weight. But, you know, obviously that's not good for you. But the other thing is that, You know, this whole idea of, oh, it's all calories in, calories out, so it's all willpower.

Like, it's a horrible message. It's a horrible message. Because now you have all these people who, you know, they listen to them and they say, okay, I cut 500 calories a day. And what happens, of course, is that their metabolic rate goes down. So your body burns 500 calories less than the weight loss stops. But because you're burning 500 calories a day less, you feel horrible. You have no energy, you know, you're feeling cold all the time. So you increase that a little bit.

So instead of, you know, going 500 down, you go say, I'm going to eat 300 less. But your body has burning 500 less. So now you're regaining that weight, right? So, but instead of those people saying, you know, there's something wrong with this treatment of just cutting 500 calories a day. Instead of that, they say, well, you must be cheating on your diet. It's your own fault, right? And it's like, no, it never was. you know, all these millions of women who blame themselves for the failure of their diet,

when the blame should have been on the diet, the calorie-restricted, low-fat diet, eating six times a day, those are the things that were the problem, not trying, instead they were trying to shift that blame onto them, which is horribly destructive, right? You have people with, you know, emotional problems and self-esteem problems, all because they thought that obesity equals sort of lack of willpower, right? And it was a horrible message, and it's still promoted by a lot of these sort of fitness guys and stuff because they don't understand the sort of science of, hey, if you take 500 calories a day less, you could either one lose body fat or two, lower your metabolic rate by 500 calories. And option two is 95% of people go, you know, their bodies tend towards option two. So therefore that's not good.

You're not going to lose body fat. Your body fat stays the same. Your metabolic rate goes down. It's not a failure of willpower. They're still doing that diet. It's like on that show the biggest loser, for example. It's always interesting to me because you look at them and they're doing all this stuff. They've got obviously lots of willpower.

Like their minds will do it if they set themselves to it. They'll run until they puke sort of thing. You can see it. And yet, we're supposed to believe that these people gain weight because they had no willpower. But just look at them. They clearly have a lot of willpower. It wasn't a failure of willpower. It was a failure of understanding that this sort of approach of calorie restriction

without understanding the hormones is actually a failed sort of theory. It doesn't work. And it's not that it falls outside of thermodynamics, right? there's three variables here. Either of those two things will satisfy that condition. So therefore you have to do something else. And that's why I talk a lot about it. I get very sort of into it because I think it's so unfair to blame these people.

You know, it's like, think about it this way. Suppose you have a classroom of 100 children and one of them fails. Sure, that might be his fault or her fault. maybe they didn't study, maybe they were lazy. But what off all of a sudden you have 70 kids who fail? Do you think all of those kids were lazy? Or is it the teacher's fault? Because I think it's more likely the teacher's fault.

So you take the same thing and say, okay, you have Americans or North Americans or the world for that matter now because it's becoming a worldwide thing. And if only a few people are obese, you might say, well, those are lazy people. But if now 50, 60, 70% of the world is obese, it's not an individual failure. It's a failure of the system. You got to look at the system and say, what is it that we're doing, which is sort of focusing obsessively on calories? What is it that we're doing that we could do better?

Because if we can do that, then we will have served those 50, 60, 70% of people. Instead, we don't. We say our system is perfect. It's all calories in, calories out. It's all willpower. You're just not following the advice. And we turn that blame, which should have fallen onto the system, onto the people who are suffering,

which is blaming the victim. And that's the problem I have with a lot of these things, is that it's all blaming the victim. It's all trying to turn our own failures as a scientific community. our own failure to understand the hormonal basis of obesity. And we're trying to turn the blame onto these people who are suffering from it. And it's like if you're blaming people, you're not helping them. Like it's not going to work right now.

And unfortunately, that's the way a lot of academic medicine. And, you know, you look at a lot of these, you know, USDA guidelines. Oh, just eat less. it's like yeah that's not going to work like that advice is not useful if it was useful i'd be the first one to give it but it's not useful it hasn't been useful it has never been useful so let's let's do better right that's that's what i always think it's such an important message and i think that one way of doing better is limiting uh and having different sources of information that's out there so again another reason that I'm just happy that you're putting out the content in the books that you do.

I want to return back to longevity, if that's okay with you, and I want to return back to fasting, for somebody like yourself who's not facing, and you've written a whole books on the topic of helping people with type 2 diabetes, helping people, and showing that it can be reversed through food, lifestyle intervention in the corporation of fasting, obesity as well too. For somebody that maybe is not battling those things, which fasting very much is a part of, and they are looking to take advantage of some of the topics that you brought up in the beginning. Some things that our ancestors knew were apart. They weren't dealing with obesity rates the way that we were, but fasting was still incorporated into their life

because there was some innate understanding of its benefits. And I'm sure you're in that category as well, right? You're not facing type 2 diabetes. You're not facing obesity. And you regularly incorporate fasting into your world. Now, I know you have apps and coaching and a whole sort of system. and methodology, and it's so personalized and individualized, but would you be willing to share how you incorporate fasting into your own life right now for your unique goals?

Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you that my goals, I mean, it's funny because my goals when I started were not longevity at all. It was, I usually skipped breakfast because I wanted to sleep until the last minute and then get out of bed and get to work sort of thing. right so i skip breakfast because hey why would i get up half an hour early every single day just to make myself breakfast eat it i'm not even hungry right why don't i sleep for that extra half an hour so and and to me it still remains a it's an important reason to fast it's like you get so much time like this podcast i put it on my lunch hour so one it makes fasting easier because i'm not thinking about it talking to you, right? So it makes the fasting easier. So put it on the schedule. That's a great

way to just get right through it. But two, it means that I don't take another hour out of, you know, the next hour and have to go to go home like an hour late. I can go home. I can read a book. I can do a puzzle. I can, you know, play with my kids. I can exercise. Like, it gives me that time back. Makes your life simpler, right? So there's these benefits that come, which, you know, and perhaps it plays into longevity too, because by getting home earlier, I can do the things that I want to do, which is going to lower my stress level,

which is huge, right? Stress is a huge killer of Americans. So you're simplifying your life. You're getting time back. You know, outside of the purely physiologic stuff of what fasting does in terms of obesity of type 2 diabetes and other stuff. But, you know, you get better focus.

you get, you know, a much simpler life, you get a lot more time back, you save money. Like, there's all these other side benefits of fasting that you don't even start to realize. Against that, you have to plot. Okay, so if you have all these benefits, why aren't you doing this? And this is what we talk about a lot in our coaching, is that it's not just about the knowledge. Okay, so there's three things. if you want to change behaviors, there's three things that you've got to remember. There's the mind, which is the knowledge.

So, of course, 10 years ago, fasting was severely frowned upon. But now assuming that you know fasting, hey, it's not that bad for you and you want to do it, but just knowing about it is not enough. The second thing is sort of the body. So what is it that's stopping you from fasting? Is it the hunger? because that's even if you know you should fast, you may or may not fast because, hey, if you're hungry, so you've got to know what to do about that hunger. And then you got to put in systems

that are going to circumvent it. So if you got to know what you're going to do if you get hungry, so in my case, for example, I, you know, I drink some green tea usually or I have some coffee. And then by the time I finish it, I get a hot cup of coffee by the time I finish it, the hunger passes. And I know that. And, you know, that's, that's, that's, that's, part of the system. One of the other systems putting it on the schedule like we're doing right now, right? So even if I was hungry, I wouldn't even be thinking about it, about, hey, where am I going to go for lunch? Because I've already got you on the schedule now. So by the time I finish here, I'm going to start my office, and I'm all done. So that automatic system is what's going to get me

through. And those are the systems that a lot of religions had put in. You're doing it with a supportive group, right? It's on the schedule. So Good Friday comes around. You know it's on the schedule is the fasting. Yeah, it's a hard, yeah, but you can get through it, right? You know, same with Ramadan, same with, you know, Yom Kippur, these other, you know, things. It's on the schedule, right? You've got something to do. And the third thing, so there's the knowledge, so the mind, there's the body, which is, what are those systems? How are you going to deal with your body not wanting to do it? And then there's the third thing, which is sort of the spirit, which is what are those emotional things that are going to stop you from doing it? Right. So again, we eat for all kinds of different reasons,

only one of which is hunger. So you eat because it's sociable, for example, you go out with friends and you eat. That's what you do, right? When you're fasting, do you have that supportive group? And again, that's how religious groups got through it. That's how millions of people do fasting every single year, whether it's on Good Friday or Yom Kippur or Ramadan. You do it because they do it as a group. They have that group support that's going to give you that emotional support that's going to let you do it. If you don't have that emotional support, and that's one of the things we try to do at the fasting method is build this community.

If you set those norms that, hey, this is our normal. You set that baseline. This is what our baseline is. then you can get through it. And that's nothing to do with knowledge that fasting is good for you or bad for you, right? These are totally different because that's the mind. This is the body and the spirit. So those emotional supports, those constructs that you're going to build to allow you to do that.

So for example, 50 years ago it wasn't so hard to get from, you know, breakfast to lunch to dinner without snacking in between. There's the social construct that we had didn't allow that. Like you took your cigarette break, but people were not eating muffins at that time. They went outside and smoked or whatever. But that construct where you don't eat snacks was ingrained. Now you have a two o'clock meeting and somebody orders a plate of cookies for you. Well, even if you're not hungry, the cookies are staring you in the face, right? You're listening some boring guy go on about this and that, right?

Oh, you know, what's the next thing you have to do? And you're looking at the cookies, right? you're going to eat that cookie. That's just the way it's going to be. But you didn't have to because nobody had to order it. So those constructs that allow you to do it is also what's important. And this is where you have to really dig deep into, okay, so let's find a way so that it will work

because it is not only about the knowledge that it's good for you. We have that knowledge. We know we shouldn't eat cookies, right? But when you put in the other things like, oh, don't have cookies in the house. no snacks or if you're an employer i always think you what you want to do is say look there's no eating at your desk there's no eating except in the designated eating spots right cafeteria and so on there's no snacks in the boardroom there's no snacks on the desk no candy bowls that's probably

the best thing you can do then people are going to go from breakfast to lunch and not do anything no donut shop in the you know coming by no snack cart coming by like Like those are not things we need. And with obesity being so important, it's actually going to be really important for the health of your things. And if I was an employer with a lot of people, that's the first thing I would say. I say, look, it's not fair to our employees who are trying to get healthy and lose weight. So therefore, I am actually just going to get rid of all of these things. Is it easy?

Absolutely. You make the rule. Who's going to disagree with you? And everybody's going to be healthier because as soon as you get busy, all of a sudden, no snacks, nothing. You're not looking at the guy eating a cookie at his desk, right? Not allowed. Those are the constructs that you can put in to make things successful for yourself. And those are the constructs that we used to have in our offices and so on that we no longer do and makes it hard for us.

Yeah, and so much of modern life is now looking back to the past. And some of the things that are ancestors or even a few generations ago, because modern life, wasn't as pervasive, especially when it came to food, and just the options and the stimulations that were there, I would argue the same thing happens with the news, right? You kind of have to be intentional about making sure that you don't get all the news alerts all the time throughout the day that we have with the 24-hour news cycle, and you're going to end up being happier. But it takes a little bit of work to try to reset some boundaries around you to be able to

enable that. Well, Dr. Fung, I want to thank you for coming on. I want to be respectful of your time because, as you mentioned earlier, you have to get back to the practice now, but just a little bit of a highlight of some of your world. You mentioned the fasting and the coaching app that you have. Where can people go to sign up if they wanted to get that community support, if they wanted some support with the behavior change,

and also to continue their knowledge to even choose what is the right fast for them. Where do people go and how do they sign up? Yeah, so you can go to the fasting method.com, and there's an app and there's a website, And there's two parts. There's coaching. You can join as individuals, although we actually tend to encourage people to join as a group, because as a group, you're going to get that additional small group support amongst your own circle, right?

So it actually gives you that additional layer of support. So we do group counseling as well, which I think is incredibly important and a little bit underutilized, I think, in our day and age where we tend to go with, like, individual stuff. and there's also a community, which is basically there's meetings, live meetings, live streams, there's knowledge. And then for knowledge, of course, you know, the other place to go as YouTube, just look up my channel. I post stuff sort of most weeks about, and on various topics about, you know,

fasting and weight loss and different topics like that. So go to those. And then, of course, if you, if you, want to take a deeper dive into some of the stuff. I've written a number of books. So you can, you can click on that and definitely check those out. It goes really in depth into the science, because that's really what I like. Whereas the app and all that sort of stuff is mostly about taking that and taking our clinical experience of sort of like eight years of working with clients and saying, okay, well, the knowledge, we can give the knowledge away for free. It's all on YouTube,

It's all on your podcast. It's all on the blogs. The knowledge is free. That's not the hard part. The hard part is actually building those support systems for the mind, the body, and the spirit. You've got to look at all three because that's actually the hardest part, not the knowing what to do. That part's actually the simplest part. Beautiful.

Well, we'll have the links to all of those below. And our last episode we did was a big hit, The Cancer Code. we went a deep dive into cancer. We'll link to that as well if people want to continue listening. Dr. Jason Fung, thank you for giving up your lunch break to chat with us and fast at the same time. I'm super grateful for you, brother. All right. Thanks so much, Drew.